About the Blogger

Hello! I am a 1L, born and raised in Rhode Island, arriving at the School of Law after receiving a B.F.A. in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. I am an eco-vegan-yogini-artist who will always remember a 5th grade school trip to the Johnston Landfill, driving up to the top of the...

Rachele's Post

Plato's Cave

Posted by Rachele Ciccone-Paquin on 10/17/2010 at 09:51 PM

Wow, it has been a little bit since my last blog entry, and for all of you who have been waiting with bated breath my return to the blogosphere, thank you for your patience! :) The first week of October was nuts, with my sister's wedding, my own one-year anniversary of my marriage, and my birthday, mixed in, of course, with layers and layers of coursework. Since I spend my weekends preparing for the week and doing all of my readings then, it is really difficult for me to take time off on the weekend to do anything but coursework, but I gave an exception for my sister's wedding. :) It really made me realize how crucial time management is in this whole law school scheme of things, and I am glad that I have at least this concept conquered. I spent the last week and a half catching up from that crazy week.

It is amazing to me that we have been in school for two months. Eight weeks, that is all? It feels like eight months, and I mean that. There is so much information and a lot of reading to be done, and amidst all of this scurrying around and trying to read, digest and conceptualize four different subject areas plus a writing course is no easy feat (not that anyone said law school was easy, of course). There are days when I feel on top of the world, leaving class saying to myself, Man, I GOT this; and others where I leave feeling like I am trying to run up the side of a building. The great thing with RWU SOL is that the professors are extremely approachable and helpful, willing to answer your emails and stay after class to clear up any lingering questions.

However, after sixty days of law school, the days can seem to run into each other, something which I always consciously tried to avoid in my pre-law-school days. I found myself in yoga class two Saturday mornings ago, emanating a feeling of stressed, pent-up energy when I was exchanging courtesies with a fellow practicioner. I answered the routine, "Hello, how are you?" with a sigh and then, "Oh, you know, same stuff, different day...How are you?" His answer has stuck with me for the past two weeks: "All good things." That's what I wanted to be feeling! Not SSDD, but that all good things are happening! Am I really letting this whole law school thing get to me? I have been reflecting on this since.

I have been fascinated with Plato's Allegory of the Cave since I read it years ago. It stayed with me throughout my painting undergraduate work and I made many paintings dealing with the philosophy of the work. And somehow it has come back to me again in law school. Maybe it is because sometimes in doing all this studying and spending hours upon hours sitting in a chair makes me feel like I am imprisoned in a cave. Maybe it is because I find myself looking at the different ideas and things to learn in my classes as being at the same time completely abstract, like the shadows the cave dwellers are looking at and attaching their own definitions to what they think they see. I realized that I was feeling like an ant in an ant farm that the giant law school hands-that-be could pick up at any time and turn upside down.

At the time when this cave-ish, ant-like feeling started to creep up into my world was at the start of a new moon, and the beginning of the change of the seasons; I turned twenty-nine, watched my little sis get married, and celebrated a year of married bliss. It was a ton of new changes, plus adding in the fact that I was just at the outskirts of the law school forest of knowledge that Professor Ruskell told us we would be building at Orientation. Two and a half weeks ago my trees were of sparse foliage and strange placement both in clumps and in far distances from one another. Now, as promised at Orientation, I can actually see the forest through the trees.

This is a photo of a painting of mine entitled "New Millennia Plato's Cave."